[Rodney King]

As I’ve said many times now, I post that about Reagan to show that we will never, ever agree with all candidates 100% of the time. It just won’t happen.

If that was your point, then it was a bad point because Reagan was strongly pro-life by the time he ran for President.

[Peach]

Another freeper who doesn’t know how to trace back posts. My post mentioned that this was all when Reagan was Governor of California. Keep up with the posts already :-)

[calcowgirl]

If that was your point, then it was a bad point because Reagan was strongly pro-life by the time he ran for President.

He was strongly pro-life when he signed the "liberal" California abortion statute, as well. I did some research and posted some of Gov. Reagan's quotes from 1967 news coverage here, after a freeper tried to tell me that the majority of GOPers were pro-choice in 1948 on the basis of that "government did not have the right to force a woman to give birth to an unwanted child" and a pro-choice position was consistent with "limited government." Here was part of that post:

In 1967, a democrat state lawmaker (Beilenson) pushed to liberalize the laws for just three reasons: to allow abortion in the case of rape, incest, or where the baby might be deformed. ...

Governor Ronald Reagan's first response as "Here's an emotional problem that has so many facets of consideration. It is not only spiritual, but also legal... when does life begin? What right does the unborn life have? What legal right? I'm not prepared to answer now."

In subsequent statements, Reagan took great exception to the portion of the law addressing the possibilty of deformity. "I am satisfied in my own mind we can morally and logically justify liberalized abortions to protect the health of a mother. I cannot justify the taking of an unborn life simply on the supposition that the baby may be born less than a perfect human being... [this kind of thing] wouldn't be much different from what Hitler tried to do."

The deformity provision was dropped shortly thereafter. The final statute permitted abortions in the case of forcible rape, incest, statutory rape if the victim was under 15 years old or if there was a "substantial risk" that continued pregnancy would "gravely impair" the "physical or mental health" of the mother.

The issue then had little to do with "limited government," nor does it now (imo).